FROM THE PRESIDENT

William M. Chace

Hold the Anchovies

We do not seem to be running out of
attacks on university life. My reading recently brought me another,
this one by Alan de Botton, a British essayist, who asks, with
clever malice aforethought: "What is Academia for?"
and then answers by saying, "for academics and not for anyone
else."

His procedure employs the preemptive strike. Of university
teachers he says: "they are really a bit odd. They often
have large foreheads, old-fashioned footwear and high-pitched
laughs. Something about their intelligence seems to interfere
with their ability to deal with aspects of ordinary existence.
Mastery of the details of agrarian reform under Tiberius or of
Greek imagery in Keats' letters leaves them ill-equipped to
apply sun cream or order a pizza."

What they are equipped to do, he says, is to generate books
of no general interest to anyone, for they have been born at
the wrong time: "the heroic age of scholarship (which started
in about 1810) has in many ways ended: most letters have been
catalogued, most texts deciphered, most lives written up conclusively.
Scholars-still urged to produce books by their departments-merely
resort to writing pedestrian commentaries which neither appeal
to the general reader, nor make any ground-breaking advances
in their field."

We now exist, he says, in "a culture of quotation,"
for scholarship has become, in our fallen state, just "writing
books about books." The real object of real scholarship,
he says, with a surprise allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche, is
"life and action. . . . We want to serve history only to
the extent that history serves life." After such a bold
call to action, I knew that the author would reveal the identity
of the culprit thwarting this profound human desire for meaningful
writing: "no wish is more regularly frustrated and implicitly
ridiculed by those in charge of universities."

As someone who, on a good day, is under the impression that
he is in charge of a university, I have a duty to respond to
such attacks. They seem to ask for rebuttal, for they are frequent
and often attractively energetic; the authors get a lift of the
heart when pillaging the academy. And frequently they conclude
with a populist call for action, for "the people" to
speak. De Botton believes that those offended by obscure and
lifeless academic writing can take hope from the market forces
pressing on higher education. Students' "ability to direct
funds to certain institutions and withhold them from others means
that their boredom will have important repercussions."

At last the threat is revealed. End the obscurity; serve "life;"
stop the boredom . . . or "repercussions" will follow:
no money for tedious scholarship and tedious scholars, the funny
folk who do not know pepperoni pizza from a sunburn.

All of this is, of course, good fun in the spirit of traditional
anti-intellectualism. But the argument breaks down with its fundamental
assumption that there are no more letters to be catalogued, texts
to decipher, or lives to write up.

Fact: The letters of W. B. Yeats, one of this century's most
powerful poets, have never been properly collected and assembled;
an Emory scholar, Ronald Schuchard, is now involved in that task.

Fact: The Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the most significant archaeological
finds of our century, still largely unpublished fifty years after
their discovery, are being interpreted by such scholars as Carol
Ann Newsom of the Candler School of Theology.

Fact: While a life is never "conclusively" written
up by anyone, an Emory scholar, Dan Carter, has recently written
the best life of former Alabama governor George Wallace.

"Heroic ages" never really existed, but the romantic
desire for them to have done so never tires out. Scholarship
today, at Emory and elsewhere, is more sophisticated, supple,
and adventuresome than it ever has been. It probably is not heroic.
It is, instead, powerful, exacting, and challenging. And its
self-directing and self-monitoring disciplinary power-its desire
to erect and maintain the highest standards of accuracy-means
that it will not easily fall victim to populist calls for "relevance"
and an end to "boredom."

Many things in modern life are not "boring." We
can see as much as we want of them on nightly television. Scholarship
at the great universities represents something else: patience
with the facts, precision of mind, response to the infinite complexity
of all human events, and an understanding that everything in
life is subject to revision. That is why scholarship continues-because
to be human is not to get it right the first time yet to desire
to get it right at last. That is what goes on, day in and day
out, at Emory.